Where do you start being proud of this team, as a fan? Playing hard every shift, consistently sticking to a system? Avoiding retaliatory penalties, even when Rinaldo, Giroux and Simmonds were dirtier than the bathroom in a South Street Philadelphia bar at three in the morning (they’ll have plenty of time to verify my comparison now). Marty not being at all fazed playing the puck, even under pressure? Stephen Gionta hitting about a foot larger than he stands? Kovulchuk’s power play goal, coming from Zubrus winning a monster faceoff in the zone? Even JR gave Kovy props in the post-game.

It starts behind the bench, with DeBoer retaining his composure through every situation. Compare him to Tortorella, who must be nursing a sore throat by the midway point of most games, or Laviolette, who pouts, frowns and gesticulates like he’s a marionette whose strings are wrapped around a drill bit. Up and down the coaching staff, you can see the development of the younger plays, the poise that the playoff newbies have exuded, and how every player focuses on every small detail.

This team is fun to watch. And we get to watch for at least another round of playoffs.

1. They do the little things. Clarkson’s Game 2-winning goal doesn’t happen if Elias doesn’t poke-check the puck away from his man on the half-boards. It’s not on the scoresheet, but that play turned a Flyers breakout into a goal-scoring chance for the Devils. Elias, Greene and Henrique have been executing the small area game very well.

2. Bryzgalov lost the nerves contest. Bryz started looking shaky handling a puck in front of the net, and shortly after that Larsson went top shelf on him; a few bouncing pucks didn’t take Larsson off his game. I don’t think the Rock needs to filled with fans wearing bear masks or carrying boxes from Build-A-Bear Workshop (although that would be really funny), but keeping Bryzgalov thinking is to the Devils’ advantage. Philadelphia can’t put their other Bob-lehead in net; the Devils owned him this season.

3. Matching lines and hitting hard works. Briere was -3 in Game 2, mostly because Larsson and Volchenkov, along with Henrique’s line, were pounding him and Giroux with regularity. The fact that Wayne Simmonds went flat-line stupid at the end of Game 2 indicates that frustrations are high.

4. The fourth line has stepped up. When you can roll four lines your top two lines are more productive. And the Devils’ fourth line has been outstanding through the playoffs.

5. You add by subtracting a negative. Kovulchuk wasn’t at his regular performance level, and finally resolving his status make everyone else’s job more clear. The Devils have shown they can stick to a system and work through adversity.

What else do I want? I’d like Sherry Ross to stop making inane comments and then repeating them ad nauseum. I’d like the NBC commentators to listen to Doc Emrick to hear how play by play can flow beautifully without comments that sound like Ross cast-offs. I’d like to understand how an obstruction penalty can be called after the horn has sounded (end of Period 2, Game 2) when there’s no movement in on-going play with which to interfere. And I’d like Bryce Salvador to score another goal.

The Devils lost as a team, just as they did in the Game 3 disaster. The question is: do the Devils have the team work and the individual accountability, and those things in the right proportions and blends, to win two games in a row, and make a playoff run that doesn’t end with a May Day call? As players, coaches, and trainers, when you look in the mirror, before, during or after Game 6 and (hopefully) Game 7, please make sure you can honestly say that you’re delivering on your end of the experiences we expect, we demand, and we hope for as your fans.

I had hoped, entering this season, that it would be a neat bookend to the first year in which Ben and were season ticket holders – the 99-00 Cup run, the first year he played ice hockey. In this last year regularly sitting next to me at dinner, on the couch and at games, I’ve probably over-rotated on high expectations, facing a shortly empty nest. But at the same time, sports memories from our last year in high school sit on the saddle point of experience. They are the net summation of people, places and things chosen for us by older family members, and the first events we can pick through given the independence of spending money, a driver’s license and formal adulthood.

Baseball had diminished interest for me in 1979 until my first sports hero Willie Stargell led his Pittsburgh Pirates to the World Series as I wrestled with college applications and parallel parking. Stargell united a diverse group of players; the “We Are Family” soundtrack to their pennant run wasn’t just a media post-production effect. They came together as a team, played as a team, and won as a team. Everyone did their part. Just a few months after he died in 2001, I had the opportunity to pick a jersey number of my own and I remembered my fondness for all things related to first baseman, number 8, Willie Stargell. The twin circles on my back are a continuous refresh of those memories that illustrated sportsmanship, leadership, bridging differences and taking personal responsibility for winning.

There are lifetimes of memories waiting to be created – for our families, for the Devils team’s families, for fans and potential fans across the Garden State – and two games in which to make them.

Pierre was the one coach that everybody loved. I really do mean everybody – players, parents, other coaches, the NJ Devils Youth Hockey board, refs, the Zamboni guy. It was impossible not to like him, with his outsized love of hockey and his innate ability to share that love. The players he coached in their single-digit years invited him back to their club as adults, so they could coach with him. There is no better statement about the quality of a coach’s character on and off the ice.

Pierre was fair, he was right, he instructed solidly and he had standards. He showed up and expected his players to do the same, whether they were 8 or 18 years old. He was “old school” in the sense that he valued hard work and simple drills that reinforced that work ethic. During one practice with my son’s bantam team (Pierre wasn’t our regular coach, he was merely helping out when needed) he was working on a breakout drill that involved skating outside of the faceoff dots. Kids were cheating through the middle so he stopped the drill, conveyed some wisdom in that Swiss-infused English that gave him enormous gravitas, got a few laughs, and then had the drill run correctly. No screaming, no throwing sticks, no tests of mettle or attitude on either side. When he blew the whistle, I think most players were secretly happy – anticipating – to see what he would share.

I think about Pierre nearly every week that I play with my adult league team. Moving slowly, I have a few extra seconds to think about my positioning on the ice, and I hear him instructing (not shouting) “Triangle!! Triangle!! Tri-ang-u-lation!!” It was his most valuable lesson, taught to PeeWees learning puck control and cycling: keep your forwards in a triangle around the net, move the puck, and move the players to maintain the triangle. The first rule of hockey – create space without the puck, create time by moving with it – conveyed using the simplest geometric shape, in a voice and style that 12 year olds visualized and committed to memory (most of them, at least). Six years later, I still hear echos of that coaching session; following sing-songy words that keep me from over-skating and passing out from exhaustion. Good advice transcends space and a lot of time.

With all of the negative press and horrifying stories about amateur athletics and youth sports, it’s critical to have role models and men like Pierre Pellaton. We all wish we could skate with him another season.

Shot with Canon 200mm f/2 telephoto

I believe hobbies are cost-constant over long periods of time. When cost comes out in the commoditization of one aspect, it re-enters at the other end of the spectrum. Historically, technology has moved professional grade equipment into the consumer space with alarming regularity – digital cameras, cell phones, video cameras, even protective equipment. The professional grade gear just keeps getting better and more expensive. What I’ve discovered about sports photography is that those long lenses you see on the sidelines of football and baseball games aren’t just for show; you need light, focal length and depth of field control to be able to capture the moment.

[Disclaimer: I am a BorrowLenses.com affiliate. I earn a very small commission on gear that you rent as a result of going to their site as a function of reading about it here. If you click through and spend money, I get a taste. If that makes you discount my thoughts, please know that I'm neither retiring now covering my hosting fees on what I'll make from referral fees. But I do believe in their product enough to promote it.]

The picture above was taken with a Canon 200mm f/2 telephoto at an ISO 800 equivalent, about 18 yards from the line of scrimmage at the back of the end zone. I love the short depth of field; the left guard is in focus (that would be the Bubba) but the quarterback is coming under center out of focus. Specular reflections of the stadium lights give you the sense that it was very dark, very cold and very tiring game. The boys who played it will carry memories of a state semi-final, a record-breaking season and accomplishments that will stand for quite some time. Despite losing, freezing and feeling the strain of carrying that lens up and down the field (there were 11 touchdowns scored in the game) I’ll forever treasure that sense of the here and now, with a lot of field behind the play.

Your teamwork created a gold standard. From a 1-9 season two years ago, to 5-5 with a playoff bid to 9-2 with a trip to the semi-finals, the journey began with teamwork that led you, consciously or not, to call each other “brothers.” Use that yardstick of measuring contribution, mutual re-inforcement and peer leadership in every situation, and you’ll always move the ball forward.

You had the benefit of outstanding, dedicated coaches who treated you with the love normally accorded your own children. You honored their preparations and advice, you corrected as needed, and you remained focused from the heat of August until a frosty late November night. There are no better courses in leadership and development than having an amazing coach; use them as role models when you evaluate management from any angle. Not many people would equate your coaches and Steve Jobs, but they both got their teams to produce results the rest of the uninformed and uncoached world thought impossible.

You will always play to your standard of integrity. Whether it’s on the field of play, in the sphere of public opinion, or in a closed door discussion, there will consistently be influences that are below or controvert the level of self-discipline and fair play to which you’ve adhered. Bring a high level of competition with even higher senses of fair play.

You will relive the joy. After the label of “last” is applied, it’s easy to fear that you won’t know the happiness that comes from a great team again. Individual memories of well-placed blocks, game preparation that made it seem you knew plays before they developed, flashes of brilliance from all corners of the turf – those feelings will return again and again because you know how to create them, and how to find them, and how to appropriately relish them, on and off of the field. If you doubt that, ask any of your parents how we felt every single week of this season, from spring weight training until driving home last night. We have the benefit of middle age, knowing that the end of the season is merely a pause in the happiness flow.

As I packed up my camera bag one of the fathers thanked me for capturing and preserving memories of the season. I owe the thanks to the team, coaches, and other parents, as I was merely a first hand, close-up observer of what a local newspaper called “the greatest MKA team ever.” The emphasis is on “team,” and I thank each and every one of you for allowing me to join you on the sideline with humor, hard work, humility and grace.

There’s the rub. The actual odds of drawing two queens of hearts in an eight-deck shoe are about 3,000 to one against (the real math is 8/416 x 7/415 to find the probability; assuming you start with a full shoe). The casino is paying you at a fraction of the required return on that one particular occurance — there’s a reasonable house advantage when it happens. But since it’s such an infrequent occurance, you need to look at the house advantage over all of the possible payouts (getting twenty with every combination of ten valued and A-9 pairings, and the bonus levels for suited and queen-included hands). You can find house advantage analyses of various side bets in blackjack; while I was initially inclined to believe that they were astronomical (over 20%) most side bets hover in the 3-8% vig range. So while you lose that bet frequently (the dealer breaks in more than three cards, or not at all, or you don’t get twenty in your first two cards), the greater than even money payouts serve to reduce the house advantage.

Count me educated: Playing the “bust it” bet is a better return on your money than playing the hard way bets on a craps table. And there’s the thrill of a jackpot payout.

So how much should you bet? That’s where the two competing mechanics of betting come into play: bet amount and bet variation. Playing well, with 3:2 blackjacks and generous doubling and splitting rules, you can get the house advantage in blackjack down to about 1.5%. You might choose to treat your side bet as a second, equal risk bet to your main “hole” bet, in which case maintaining about a 5:1 ratio between them gives you consistent risk. In other words: Bet $10 on your hand, and $2 on the dealer break side bet, and your expected return on each bet is about minus fifteen cents.

I started down this mental boardwalk after watching someone bet the same amount on the blackjack hand and the side bet, clearly increasing the house advantage on the total amount on the felt. The net result of that betting strategy is to make blackjack about three times more expensive, per hand, averaged over all of your bets. The counterbalance to house advantage is bet variation. If you’re winning a bit less than half of your hands, on average, you need to increase your bet (and win) periodically to expect a positive return over dozens or hundreds of hands. Betting the same amount every hand, every time, may result in you winning five or ten bets, but the probability of that is the same as the probability of a coin toss coming up heads five or ten times more than tails over a larger number of tosses.

Tonight’s mathematical and phraseology rambling comes to a close with a linguistic dissection of the New York State Lottery’s tag line “You never know.” People are fond of saying that buying a lottery ticket (for the jackpot games) is stupid, because buying a ticket doesn’t appreciably increase your chances of winning. That is false: If you don’t buy a ticket, your probability of winning remains at zero, and no higher. What people mean, I believe, is that the odds of winning the lottery are so astronomical, that the probability of a family member or friend hitting it big and making a gift to you nets an expected return about equal to that of winning the entire jackpot after buying a ticket. You never know, right? So the expected winnings are the same whether you buy a ticket or not; your expected return isn’t because the ticket has a cost. The expected return on a $1 ticket is close to minus one dollar; the expected return from knowing people who play the lottery is miniscule but positive.

If you want to ensure a positive return on your gambling stake, buy tickets to see Guys and Dolls. Otherwise, know the rules of the numbers game.

Let’s just say that a guy who knows a guy yelled at me for this, and says Patty is here for 1,000 career points (or more). With 816 career points in the NHL, all with the Devils, and averaging roughly 70 points a year, that’s two-three more solidly productive years. I’ll sign up to watch and cheer for those career goals (and points). And implicit in that is the hope that the NHL suffers no further labor issues, and that players benefit from a CBA that respects seniority, loyalty and market dynamics.

What I find amusing is that Bubba and I were just talking about Elias’ career with the Devils, and how he’s not only the scoring leader but also the “freshman development” leader. This came after a hot day of summer football practice spent indoctrinating incoming (high school) freshman, and thinking about his role as a literal senior on the field. As I’ve written here before, if the lessons Bubba takes from Elias are about loyalty (think contract), friendship (think Sykora jersey in 2000), leadership on and off the ice, flexibility (played all three forward positions this year), and dealing with negativism (when asked what he did differently to pick up scoring in the 2003 Cup Finals, Elias said “Didn’t listen to you guys” to the press), then he’s chosen a hero wisely for solid points and career goals.

I just made the final payment for our 2011-2012 season ticket shares, knowing full well it’s the last year of Elias’ contract with the Devils and Bubba’s last year of high school. Six summers ago I was delighted that I didn’t have to rationalize market pricing, free agency and loyalty to my 11-year old when Elias signed a seven-year deal with the Devils, knowing that they’d reach the horizons of their current time perspectives in the same calendar month. They are exactly 18 years apart; this spring Ben will be in the position Elias was on the day Ben was born: 18 years old and ready to face the world.

The day you become a parent is the day you begin the voyage of 10,000 steps toward an empty nest when your kids are adults and living most of their lives somewhere else. I’ve certainly thought about it over the last few years, but I never expected that the first indicator would come with mascot NJ Devil’s picture on it. I’ve already told the group I don’t know what I’ll do past next season, when I lose my regular seat mate, my hockey expert and my Carvel confidante.

As the Stanley Cup Finals play out to conclude this season, and we look forward to the draft and free agency that officially mark the start of the NHL New Year’s celebration, I believe I’m entitled to a wish and a resolution. My resolution is to cheer loudly for the home team, for all definitions of “home,” through college applications and high school sports and minor automobile damage.

My wish is that the Devils carry our 2011-2012 season as far into June as possible, stretching out this next series of shared family moments, momentarily delaying my inevitable step into the next phase of free agency.

For the first time since we began following our hometown hockey boys, there is no April joy, no second season, no reason to start watching out of market games because of their scheduling implications. The only things left to do are cheer against the Rangers and watch Zach Parise improve in his last four games before free agency.

As badly as the season started, there were so many things of which to be proud since mid-January. Patrik Elias was on fire, skating perhaps better than before the lockout season, and finishing in the slot as well as he did in 2001-2002. First hat trick in five years – against Philly, a team he just pwns – is evidence enough. Some real chemistry on the lines was a positive. Going 24-4-2 over a 30 game stretch; more than a third of a season of close to perfect hockey in every imaginable shape and form. And yet there were disasters as well: not correcting the trajectory before the season was out of hand (whether it was MacLean, Langenbrunner, or some combination of them and other factors we’ll never know, but I’m personally hoping Dallas goes deep so the Langebrunner trade yields a prospect). Injuries to the defense left us with three freshmen on the blueline nearly the whole season. Colin White’s play improved tremendously once Lemaire was back, and then he was repeatedly scratched with a nagging injury down the stretch. Salvador is gone. Taormina is recovering. There’s such potential there with Volchenkov, Tallinder, and Green all healthy at the same time.

With a long off-season, here’s hoping the Devils stay in shape and train through the warm months. That they come back in September hungry, wanting to never feel this way in early April again. That the echoes of Montreal’s fans signing “Hey Hey, Goodbye” resonate and reverberate, and remind them of what preparation and conditioning and team play can deliver or deny. It was a tough year to be a fan, and yet the last third of the season saw some of the best attendance at the Rock since the buiding opened.

Personally, I’ve yet to watch a baseball game or take out the golf clubs, subconsciously not wanting the miracle of the last two months to end, never wanting to see a wizardly Jacques Lemarie behind the curtain frantically telling us to pay attention to the flash and not the reality. But reality has set in, and for the first time in 15 years, I’m sorry to see the arrival of summer.